


The Dryad's Promenade

by Alona



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-15
Updated: 2015-06-15
Packaged: 2018-04-04 14:04:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4140501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alona/pseuds/Alona
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>July 1817 - Arabella visits Lady Pole</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dryad's Promenade

Arabella Strange had been two weeks in England before she called upon Lady Pole. 

She would have gone sooner -- at once. The curiously shy and formal letters they exchanged while she was still in Italy could not supply the hundredth part of what she wished. Visions of their reunion were her constant companions on the voyage home. The travellers stopped some days at Geneva, but Arabella could never afterward recall a single view of that city, if it were not the pattern of the wallpaper in her room at their inn, which fixed her attention whenever it drifted from scenes of agonizing sweetness she had been imagining between herself and her friend. 

But upon arriving in London she found her time and company much monopolised. Sympathetic friends and acquaintance presented themselves by the dozen to be awkward and reserved in her presence. The Stranges' attorney Mr Martin1 had a world of things to say to her and documents for her to read and approve which she understood only imperfectly and suspected Mr Martin of understanding little better. Magic was returned to England, but the body of magical law, he told her, lagged sadly far behind the times. The Greysteels, stopping on in the capital before concluding their journey, insisted on keeping her with them, to advise on Flora's wedding clothes, Aunt Greysteel said, but Arabella was convinced they feared she would disappear if she left their sight. Her brother Henry, notified beforehand of her arrival, had turned up an acquaintance who could host him in London, and Arabella's first meeting with him was so painful as to leave her indisposed for fresh reunions for some time; subsequent meetings were hardly better. At a dinner party in her honour she was once accused of being her husband's tool in an anti-Norrellite conspiracy, and the scathing response she concocted as a reply to this absurd suggestion comforted her not one bit, only occurring to her after she had lain sleepless in her bed for an hour that night. 

On the whole it was such a tiresome business to return from the dead after a year and half's absence, that Arabella soon felt herself unequal to dealing with any part of it for too long at a stretch. The affliction of her spirits that had begun to ease surged up in full force. She grew distracted; she was convinced she heard the mournful bell of Lost-hope; she felt she should lose her reason if she could not get up and dance. Many were the gatherings she walked out of mumbling half-excuses about the warmth of the fire and the lateness of the hour. Afterwards she was angry with her herself -- behaviour less like the Arabella Woodhope of Clunbury was scarcely conceivable; and after all she was not, by many weary miles, the Arabella Woodhope of Clunbury. 

The change was sadly apparent when she called once again at the house in Harley-street. The lapse of a few years had made no alteration to the outward character of the house; the maid-servant who greeted her was one she remembered from her prior visits. But when Arabella had crossed the threshold she felt, without at first knowing why, that her senses had been muffled. The fretfulness now all too familiar to her pricked at the back of her neck. She stared fixedly at the ties of the maid's neat cap, taking refuge in details. 

Casting her mind about, she fixed on something Aunt Greysteel had said to Flora. They had all just arrived in England. Thinking no doubt that Arabella was not attending, Aunt Greysteel had whispered to her niece, "This hardly feels like England. It is fanciful in me, I am sure, but I should not have believed this was the same England we left, if I were not obliged to. It is as though there is too much behind things. No doubt it is all this talk of magic has given me such notions." And she had apologised for her foolishness and not mentioned it again. 

Arabella had not then noticed anything of the sort -- she had thought it was because she was too used to magic -- but she had an idea, being led through the house in Harley-street, of what Aunt Greysteel had sensed -- only in reverse. There had been much behind the house when she had visited it before; there was not now. She felt lost. 

She needed urgently to be speaking. 

"And how is your mistress, Lucy?" she asked. Her voice was breathless and uneven to her own ears.

"Quite well, ma'am, I'm sure," said the maid. She paused and studied Arabella for a moment, as if judging how open to be. Apparently seeing nothing to dissuade her, she continued, "Very busy with her correspondence, she always is. Her ladyship has angered half the men in the kingdom with all her writing." 

"So I have gathered," said Arabella, smiling a little at the mixture of pride and awe in Lucy's voice. 

The brief exchange had settled her nerves. As Lucy shewed her into a sitting-room she had not been inside before, Arabella felt all the exquisite anticipation natural to such an event. 

It was a pleasant room, modishly furnished in shades of lilac. Her friend sat writing at a desk at the centre of it. The desk was a solid piece of furniture, laid out with stacks of books, newspapers, letters, and sheaves of blank paper. Heaps of writing materials were gathered here and there. Lady Pole was facing neither towards nor away from her. What Arabella saw was the characteristic curve of her cheek, the flutter of her eyelashes as she bent over her work, the steady poise of her head. The arrangement of her hair and her clothes were as elegant as ever, but in a more severe style than she had worn before. Her right hand moved over a sheet of paper, writing steadily; with her whole left hand she gripped the edge of the table firmly like a pilot gripping a ship's wheel. The only sound in the room was the scratch of pen on paper. 

Arabella felt she had never truly appreciated how beautiful her friend was, or how strong. She heard Lucy's receding steps in the passage. She thought she made a noise. 

Lady Pole shot to her feet and turned to face the door, her left hand still braced on the edge of the table. Her pen was in her other hand, forgotten. There was a glow of life and spirits upon her face such as Arabella had scarcely imagined could exist there. 

"You are here!" she said. 

Arabella reached out her hands. 

For a moment Lady Pole stood still, almost stricken. Then she seemed to notice the pen she still held and carefully arranged it with its fellows on the table. She took a breath that was perfectly audible in the still room and closing the distance between them at an incredible speed went to meet Arabella's waiting embrace.

There followed such scenes as are scarce to be described. To meet once again in safety and in freedom, they who had lately seen each other amidst the terrors and miseries of Lost-hope! To indulge in all the tears and embraces that had been always interrupted by the demands of their captor! Each to find in the other a heart as feeling and open as her own! It was all that Arabella had been imagining and desiring, had she been conscious of it. 

They sat down together on a sofa. They both spoke; she knew not what either said. The words were not to the purpose. The caressing tones, the traces of tears still shining on their cheeks, the wildly joyful press of Lady Pole's hand in hers, these things held all the meaning they could command for many minutes. 

At length a lull came in the pitch of their emotions, and Arabella said, "I hardly believe it when I learnt you had returned to this house, having been so long unhappy here."

"It was not the place made me unhappy," said Lady Pole. "Besides, I must be in London if I am best to pursue my chosen course. This house does as well as another, and I cannot be turned out of it."

"I should have liked to see you earlier, but yet you know I have felt very close to you since being in London. I have been hearing of you everywhere. Everyone has had some information to impart." 

"That is no wonder to me. I have worked it should be so. You see my desk there. I am kept busy with all my correspondence."

"Do the great men of the kingdom spare so much time to write to you, then?"

"Some do," said Lady Pole with a shrug. "The rest have clerks and secretaries and such whom one can plague. And then, these so-called great men are not all my correspondents. After my account of Mr Norrell's malice appeared in the papers -- the respectable ones, of course, refused to print it, but there are many others not so nice -- young ladies from all over the country -- and not so young ladies -- began to write to tell me the most miserable stories you can imagine, all about how they had been ill-used by their fathers and husbands and brothers. In most cases I have been able to offer only comfort; I have advised where I felt I safely could. It is amazing," she said in the driest tone possible, "how many of them there are." 

"But why should they write to you? And is it not too much of a tax upon your nerves to support all these afflicted ladies?" Privately Arabella was shocked at the idea. 

"A tax upon my nerves!" Lady Pole repeated with a laugh. "Indeed no. Pray do not trouble yourself about my nerves. I have none. Where the ordinary lady is supposed to keep nerves I seem instead to have a hard ball of anger pressing upon me. It eases it to write to these women and shew I feel with them. They write, I suppose, because I am the only person at all likely to believe them. I am at work convincing John Segundus to make Starecross Hall into a refuge for the most desperate. He is not the very worst sort of man; he has only got some extremely silly scruples to be got over. His patroness is a very wealthy woman who should not feel the burden. And my own fortune, you know, is good for the purpose." 

Here Arabella felt herself in some difficulty. Carefully she said, "But will not Sir Walter...?" 

"Oh! Walter has been quite ruined. His reputation was too tied to Norrell's and -- Mr Strange's. He does not further require my money for his career. He does not mind anything now. And there is a whole world of things he cannot manage without Stephen. Stephen is gone out of England, as I wrote to you. He killed the enchanter." She left a pause for Arabella to pick up the thread, but Arabella could not supply what she wanted, and Lady Pole was forced to go on. "I had heard Walter say he would be quite lost without Stephen, but I do not think he meant it. He has been surprized to discover his pretty little phrase was the exact truth." 

Arabella could not like this speech. "Forgive me, my dear Emma, but you know I have ever thought you estimated Sir Walter below his deserts. Such a devoted husband!"

"Yes," said Lady Pole, with the same coolness Arabella had been used to find fault with in her attitude towards her husband. It seemed it was not, as Arabella had half-convinced herself, a symptom of her enchantment. "He fears me now. As devoted as ever, I suppose, but he cannot be with me. Just now he has gone to stay with some friends in the country and has no thought of returning. I believe he is enjoying himself." 

Seizing on the one part of her discourse that could be safely entered into, Arabella said, "I have also found my old friends fear me. At least, they are not easy in my company. I believe the greater part of them believed Jonathan had murdered me!" She paused to compose herself. This detail was still a sore point with her. "Yet they have been at such lengths to spare me from the rumours -- they have almost let me suspect worse than the reality -- but I should still have them behave so, sooner than imitate my brother."

"You have seen him?"

"Three times already. He -- Henry has never liked the idea of magic. He likes it a good deal less now. When we first met he asked me how I had liked Italy. As if a trip to Italy were all that had ever been in question! The only time I alluded to our captivity he affected not to hear me. For the remainder of the conversation he treated me like an over-stimulated child. It was most disagreeable." And, she thought, he had come within a hair's-breadth of accusing her of boasting of her inclusion in the dreary revels at Lost-hope, or of fabricating the whole ordeal. One accusation could hardly be more painful than the other. Tears of frustration gathered in her eyes at the memory, and she breathed deeply to still them. 

Lady Pole pressed her hand. "I am sorry for it."

"In time we may reach a better understanding. But for now I would rather he returned to his parish as soon as possible."

"You will not be returning with him?"

"I intend to stay in London. It is what my spirits seem to want. I am looking for somewhere to settle -- my own house having disappeared. We shall see each other often again. That is, if you are not too much occupied." 

"Can you think so! I, be too much occupied to give my time to you, after your years of devoted friendship! After we have been companions in suffering!"

Arabella owned that she had spoken lightly, and made such a speech as left no doubt that she appreciated the depth of Lady Pole's attachment to her. All she had meant was that she could have no part in her friend's correspondence, nor in her scheme of a shelter for maltreated ladies. "Though you must have other activities to vary your days. Do you go out? Take exercise? I find a long walk most beneficial. And I think I remember hearing that you became fond of walking after your resurrection."

Lady Pole's countenance assumed the bitter smile that had been her nearest approach to mirth in the days of her enchantment. "Before my death," she began, "I had long been the prisoner of ill health and -- " She paused, before repeating firmly, "Of ill health." 

Arabella said nothing. She had heard as much as she needed to know from no less an unquenchable gossip than Drawlight how Mrs Wintertowne had refused to countenance the suggestion that her daughter was ill. It was a subject they had not touched upon before. This reticence was a fresh proof that Lady Pole wished to avoid it. 

"Returning to life, I found myself endowed with an energy that had been beyond my power even to imagine. Nothing tired me! I could have walked from here to Newcastle without the least difficulty! And just as I was growing used to this new freedom, which I had thought would never be mine, it became another tool to chain me with. Freedom to move, yes -- to move at the whim of the enchanter, to move through endless dank halls, through bizarre, disgusting rituals, through nightmares and horrors and the death of all my happiness and comfort!" Her face was flushed, and her clenched hands trembled with force at her sides. "That is what he did to me." 

"Mr Norrell," said Arabella. 

"Yes, Mr Norrell!" Then, after a moment's consideration, "Or Walter, or whoever you like. The point is that it was done, and walking is no pleasure to me now. Oh," she added, in a calmer voice, "I do walk from time to time, for the exercise. Though I do not suppose I need it. But, Arabella, are you unwell?" 

Indeed Arabella hardly knew, nor could she find the words to answer. She stood and went to a window, where she could only stare at the tracery of minute cracks in the paint on the frame. Lady Pole came to stand with her and placed a hesitant hand on her shoulder, which Arabella covered mutely with her own. After a time she said, "Please excuse me. I have not been myself since being disenchanted." 

"It is my doing. I should not have spoken so vividly. I have recalled those evil times too clearly. In future I shall take better care." 

"I admire that you can speak of it as you do. I feel ashamed to be so much affected, when your suffering was by far the longer, and yet you bear it so well." 

"Do I? I suppose that is true. Nothing has helped me so much as to be able to speak. To have the power to make others hear me. You must not compare yourself to me. Our experiences not been the same, and then we are such different people." 

This was a peculiar concept for Arabella, but she admitted the truth of it to herself. She had always known they thought and felt differently on many subjects. Was it their shared misery that had made her forget it? She felt a brief, scalding pang of envy; here was Lady Pole, who had been a decade bespelled, enjoying greater comfort than she ever had in her life, entering with all her forces into everything that interested her, by her own profession nerveless and untouchable. In the next moment she felt more ashamed than ever of such an unworthy sentiment. She tried to meet Lady Pole's eye and could not. Then something so unexpected attracted her notice she lost every other sensation in surprize. 

"Good heavens!" she said. "Whatever can that be?"

Lady Pole raised her eyebrows and followed Arabella's pointing finger. "Oh," she said. "That."

The "that" in question was a picture frame leaning against the wall which had been all but obliterated by a profusion of living ash tree branches that appeared to have sprung from the wood of the frame. On closer examination, Arabella saw that there was a canvas in the frame, and it was the canvas that had sprouted this unusual growth. 

"That is a witness to my folly," said Lady Pole, blushing a little. "With magic being returned to England and magicians of every stripe appearing, I thought there was no reason I should not be one as well. So I tried to do a spell."

"Indeed!" said Arabella, who could not have been more shocked if her friend had communicated an attempt to go to the moon.

"Oh, yes. As a girl I was deeply interested in magic. I once read of a spell that brought pictures of trees to life2. There was an indifferent, would-be picturesque sort of watercolour of an ash tree hanging in the hall outside this very room. I brought it inside and tried out the magic. You see it worked, only then I could not undo it, however I tried. I have left it here. I could hardly have put it back in this condition. But that is beside the point. The experiment was a success." 

"I am surprized you should have attempted it. After all, magic is not -- " She stopped in some confusion. 

Lady Pole gave a wry chuckle. "Not a fit occupation for a lady, you were going to say?" 

"No. That is, yes, but... Anyway, I am sorry for whatever I had in mind. I should not think you wanted to be a magician, though, of any kind. I should not," she added quietly, "be entirely comfortable if you were one."

"Perhaps you are right. I take near enough your view of the matter. There is something so masculine about most of the magic one reads of. I meant to prove a point, I believe."

"What will you do with the result?"

Lady Pole smiled benignly at the warped picture. "I shall leave it where it is," she said, "as a salutary reminder."

"Of what?"

"I do not know precisely. I expect it will occur to me sooner or later. Unless... Will it trouble you to see it when you visit?" 

"No. No, I do not think so. I like it," said Arabella more decidedly than she felt. "Do you think it will continue to grow?"

"You see it already half again as large as when I first meddled with it. If it ends by becoming an entire tree I shall have to find somewhere to plant it, before it grows through the ceiling." 

"It seems a most effective spell and, despite what you say, not at all masculine. Where did you read of it?"

"I have forgotten." Lady Pole paused. "It is something the Raven King is meant to have done." She did not seem to like giving this answer and changed the subject at once. "Arabella, how soon do you anticipate finding a place to live?" 

"Not long, but I do not yet have any place in view."

"Then will you do me the honour of being a guest in this house?" 

Arabella embarked on protestations of not wishing to cause inconvenience and of how perfectly comfortable she was with the Greysteels, but grew quiet when Lady Pole only regarded her with a calm, expectant air. Then she said the honour would be all on her side and arrangements for her removal to Harley-street were made with an incredible swiftness. She hardly knew what she felt. It was clear the idea had been forming in Lady Pole's mind throughout the conversation. 

Before leaving to acquaint the Greysteels with her new plans, Arabella stopped before the bough-laden frame and examined it once more. It was not a pretty thing. The new growth had twisted and splintered the original frame. The branches grew wild, as though somewhere a parent tree stood in a forest and had broken through the painting. Yet there was a kind of pattern to how the plant had begun to arrange itself after the first shock was over. An elegance owing nothing to notions of the picturesque seemed on the verge of making itself known. Arabella reached out to brush a leaf and almost felt the warm, insinuating exhalation of the deep still forest on a summer evening. "I _do_ like it," she said, turning back to Lady Pole. "It is almost like a talisman of protection. That is how it seems to me." 

"So that is what you think," said Lady Pole, with a smile playing about her lips. 

"You think otherwise?"

But Lady Pole only shook her head and let the smile spread across her face.

* * *

1. Geoffrey Martin advised Jonathan Strange upon legal matters beginning in 1811. After Strange's disappearance he became interested in magical law and went on to join a commission advising the government upon its enforcement. In this he was assisted by Jonathan Strange's former student Tom Levy, who had by this time distanced himself from his fellow pupils.

2. Several spells of this general type are known, but the one Lady Pole is likely thinking of is the Dryad's Promenade, which is often mentioned in accounts of the Raven King's magic. An illustration of this spell was found on a wooden casket dating from the 13th century and recovered in the 17th from the coal-cellar of a village church in Cornwall. Damage to the paint has made the subject matter difficult to identify, but it is commonly agreed to commemorate an adventure of the Raven King. The best preserved panel shews him beckoning to a pair of birch trees stepping out of a tapestry. Roger Abernethy, who discovered the casket, named it the Dryad's Promenade with perhaps more whimsy than accuracy, but the name has stuck to the casket and the spell. No other references to the King or anyone else performing this spell are extant. Its purpose is not known.


End file.
